EXPENSIVE luxury vehicles were being targeted by syndicate members posing as employees of vehicle dealerships with the aim of stealing the cars, an adviser to insurance companies warned yesterday.
Hugo van Zyl, chief executive of the SA Insurance Crime Bureau (SAICB), said the syndicates posed as employees of service departments or customer service centres at dealerships to identify owners of vehicles.
“At the moment the problem is not in the Western Cape. The syndicates have been operating mostly in Gauteng, Mpumalanga and KwaZulu-Natal,” Van Zyl said.
The SAICB was established in 2008 to advise the insurance industry on organised crime. Its notice about the syndicates was published on the websites of dealerships in Cape Town this week.
Van Zyl said the syndicates’ modus operandi was to obtain information about vehicles booked in for servicing or for repairs at the service department of a dealership.
They would also gather the contact information of clients who made the booking.
“Once the owner of a targeted vehicle logs a complaint, he will receive a phone call from one of the suspects pretending to be either the customer service manager from the dealership’s head office or somebody from the specific service department.”
The syndicate then arranged for the vehicle to be picked up from the client to have the problem resolved at the dealership and disappeared with the vehicle, he said. – Staff Writer